Re: On a menu...

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 02:54:55AM +0000 or thereabouts, Kyle Zielinski wrote:
> Because I prefer a menu to a drawer, I was trying to set up a 'Normal' menu
> as compared to a 'Main Menu' (options you can select in the Menu
> Properties) But I've no clue as to how I can get my 'normal menu' to have
> links to programs in it.  I'm sure it's a rather simple awner, but it's
> stumping me.  I made a directory called .menu for it, as I assumed that I
> could just put symbolic links in that directory and they would show up
> under the menu on my panel, but it didn't work.  How would I work this out?
>  Is there a way to use 'gmenu'?

The .menu is a good logical guess, I think, going by the number of other
dotfiles, but it's not the right one this time :)

I just tried changing my menu from 'main' to 'normal' and I can see what
you mean. It lists the directories in your home directory and tells you
that each one is empty. This of course isn't true. I think what Gnome is
looking for, after some experimentation, is a '.desktop' file for each
program. That seems to be what triggers things showing up on menus. I 
just tried copying the /usr/share/gnome/apps/Games/freecell.desktop file
into one of my sub-directories, Test, and when the menu is a 'normal' menu, 
then freecell shows up as an option I can click on in Test. (The
/usr/share/ directory is where they live on Red Hat, I believe it's
elsewhere -- /opt, perhaps? on other systems.) 

This means you have to know what goes in these .desktop files. There's
lots of examples -- try looking for any of the files in that directory
I mentioned and you'll find piles -- but it sounds like the hard way round.

I'm not sure what it is that you prefer in a menu to a drawer, because
I don't use drawers, but you can add programs you want to run a lot
onto the main menu with gmenu. You need to know the name of the program in 
question (the name you'd type at the command line, so 'gtcd' instead of
'CD player' and so on), but you don't have to mess around with making 
programname.desktop files for them: they just show up on the user menu 
section. I don't know if that's what you're looking to do?

Telsa